Among developers of workstation software, one of the most pressing requirements is for a software reliability program which can automatically test each of the components of a software application and identify problems, sometimes referred to as "bugs", in the application, and report the problems. To date, this processing is tedious and performed by a team of persons who identify test sequences and perform the tests on the software application.
Some attempts have been made at interactively debugging programs by setting break points and other traps in an application and observing the application as it executes. This approach was patented by DEC in U.S. Pat. No. 4,589,068. However, this approach could not test the unique characteristics of each subroutine/function of a software application and resulted in incomplete test operations.